Putin’s propaganda attributes Nazi backgrounds to politicians


In July 1987, Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker made a state visit to the Soviet Union. The epoch of glasnost and perestroika had begun, and the hosts arranged, among other things, a television discussion between the German head of state and young communists in Moscow, which was also broadcast on German television. Mathias Schreiber, the newspaper’s television critic, noted with cultural-patriotic pride that the sixty-seven-year-old Federal President refrained from “the fussy, top-down teaching” of the state party’s junior leaders, which had unfortunately become commonplace in the Federal Republic’s debates.

The guest was so polite and clever enough to believe that the young cadres who questioned him impartially had so much expertise and social intelligence that he only used diplomatic irony for the purpose of didactic demonstration, which his interlocutors were allowed to find flattering and encouraging. Weizsäcker replied to the question, which seemed prepared, “What anti-war movements are there in the FRG?” The degree of organization in the Federal Republic is much lower than in the Soviet Union, since there is no central control in his country, but yes could he assure the questioner that the desire for peace among German youth is no less than that of Soviet youth.

A thematically related question was “neo-fascist tendencies in the FRG”. Almost every other German politician, Schreiber remarked, would have rejected this accusation, or at least corrected it, in a tone of indignation. Weizsäcker apparently contented himself with declaring the concern “with a clear conscience” to be unfounded, but then, of course, gained a dialectic punchline from the unpleasant topic in the form of a homework assignment. As he understands perestroika, it also includes the “transformation of one’s own thinking” and the breaking down of clichés. Thirty-five years have passed: those from the next generation of the CPSU who remained loyal to the system are now the leaders of Putin’s state apparatus.

Reformation of a state elite

The transformation of the thinking of this elite, which approaches its tasks with the illusion of a historical vocation, has come to a standstill, yes, one must even speak of a regression: neo-fascist tendencies are still being identified in the Federal Republic of Germany, and this apparent finding is extremely primitive justified, with clan thinking as a biologistic shrinkage form of materialism. According to the Russian propaganda on German-language Telegram channels, the Federal Chancellor and the Federal Minister of Finance are descended from Nazis. However, the photo montages presented as evidence do not show the grandfathers of Scholz and Lindner, but namesakes. Why should a German audience care about these clumsy fakes?

Like Weizsäcker’s subtle work of persuasion in Moscow in 1987, today’s Russian informers start with the self-image of the other person. There is a popular notion among the German people that their identity, for better or for worse, is determined by being composed of families “with a Nazi background,” to use a term whose inventors, Instagram publicists Moshtari Hilal and Sinthujan Varatharajah, just described were awarded the Lessing Prize for Criticism in Wolfenbüttel.

On May 8, on Anne Will’s talk show, social psychologist Harald Welzer lectured the Ukrainian Ambassador about the “spokesman’s position” of “members of this society”, for whom the brown background has become the most important element in all family photos. For the quarter million signatories of the open letter, which wants to refuse the Ukrainians the delivery of heavy weapons, Welzer claimed that each of them was probably involved because of a war experience passed on in their own families. In the “legendary speech” on May 8, 1985, “Richard von Weizsäcker spoke of liberation, although his own father had been sentenced in Nuremberg as a war criminal”.



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